Here are 100 books that The Coming First World Debt Crisis fans have personally recommended if you like The Coming First World Debt Crisis. Book DNA is a community of 13,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of The Grapes of Wrath

Gretchen McCullough Author Of The Wondrous Springs of Balmorhea: A Literary Chronicle of New Deal Days

From my list on personal cost for many Americans during the Great Depression.

Why am I passionate about this?

My grandfather dictated a number of oral histories shortly before he died and left a series of sketchy diaries of his education at Sul Ross University (then Sul Ross State Teachers' College) in Alpine, Texas. Many years later, I got interested in his life and went to Sul Ross University to the archives, where the librarians gave me countless oral interviews from the 1930s and documents about the Civilian Conservations Projects in the area, namely the establishment of Big Bend National Park and the Balmorhea State Park Swimming Pool. This ignited my interest in the 1930s Depression and the New Deal—how, in a very short time, the U.S. federal government established work relief programs to help thousands out of work. 

Gretchen's book list on personal cost for many Americans during the Great Depression

Gretchen McCullough Why Gretchen loves this book

When I first read The Grapes of Wrath in high school, I was moved by the story of the Joad family’s poverty and desperation, and the lack of sympathy they encountered when they arrived in California. 

It is a very gritty description of their journey to California, and details how their dreams sour when they arrive, working as slaves for big orchard owners. This was the fate of thousands of farmers who fled the Dust Bowl. 

I now want to reread all of Steinbeck’s work. 

By John Steinbeck ,

Why should I read it?

24 authors picked The Grapes of Wrath as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.'

Shocking and controversial when it was first published, The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck's Pultizer Prize-winning epic of the Joad family, forced to travel west from Dust Bowl era Oklahoma in search of the promised land of California. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires and powerlessness, yet out of their struggle Steinbeck created a drama that is both intensely human and majestic in its scale and moral vision.


If you love The Coming First World Debt Crisis...

Book cover of December on 5C4

December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

Book cover of Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

Clifton Crais Author Of The Killing Age

From my list on capitalism and how our world really works from a historian's point of view.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a historian by training and have spent my career of nearly forty years studying human violence, and economic change and development. This has brought me to many dark places, to the human capacity to destroy. But all this work has also brought me to the study of those who resisted, all the people who envisioned different ways of being in the world, different futures. I have written many books on these topics. My latest, The Killing Age, is in many respects the summation of work I have been doing since the early 1980s.

Clifton's book list on capitalism and how our world really works from a historian's point of view

Clifton Crais Why Clifton loves this book

I loved reading from an old-school radical who cuts to the chase.

Davis was one of the first people to really look into climate change and its relationship to economics and human suffering.

While it is a tough read, I really liked how one almost felt being back in the nineteenth century, a time of extraordinary change with the rise of industrial capitalism.

By Mike Davis ,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked Late Victorian Holocausts as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Examining a series of El Nino-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case…


If you love Ann Pettifor...

Book cover of Sexy Selfie Nation: Standing Up for Yourself in Today's Toxic, Sexist Culture

Sexy Selfie Nation by Leora Tanenbaum,

The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.

Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…

Book cover of Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy

Nick Dearden Author Of Pharmanomics: How Big Pharma Destroys Global Health

From my list on to understand why the world is in such a mess.

Why am I passionate about this?

So many of the problems we face as a society stem from the way our economy works. But the economy is presented as something technical and dry, or even simply the ‘natural state of things’. It makes it hard for people to understand where power lies, or even to imagine how it could be otherwise. If we want things to be different – and we really need things to be different – we’ve got to find better ways of communicating what’s going on. I’ve chosen some books that do this – to explain how economic decisions are made. And always to point to the possibility of it all being very different and much better. 

Nick's book list on to understand why the world is in such a mess

Nick Dearden Why Nick loves this book

“I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalization. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”

In 2005, Tony Blair told his party that a new, free-market, globalized form of capitalism was inevitable. Filipino theorist, activists and later politician Walden Bello begged to differ. He believed globalization was a political choice, and one that suited Western elites and their multinational corporations, at the expense of the mass of humanity.

In Deglobalization, Bello sets out to show how things could be different, imagining a more diverse international economy centred on the principle of being as democratic as possible.

By Walden Bello ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Deglobalization as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

How to manage the global economy - and, more fundamentally, whether humanity wishes it to go in an ever more market-oriented, transnational corporation-dominated, and capital-footloose direction - is the most important international question of our time. In this short and trenchant history of those bodies -- the World Bank, IMF, WTO, and Group of Seven -- which have promoted this economic globalization, Walden Bello:

- Points to their manifest failings;

- Examines the major new ideas put forward for reforming the management of the world economy;

- Argues for a much more fundamental shift towards a decentralized, pluralistic system of…


Book cover of The New War on the Poor: The Production of Insecurity in Latin America

Mary E. Hawkesworth Author Of Globalization and Feminist Activism

From my list on capitalism’s iniquities.

Why am I passionate about this?

Two weeks before qualifying for his 30-year pension benefits, my father lost his job. This corporate reduction in labor force introduced a debilitating shame to the displaced breadwinner and a new level of precarity to a family with 3 of 4 kids in college. It also shattered the myth that capitalism rewarded individual initiative and hard work. Understanding inequities and the manifold structural forces that can determine an individual’s life prospects became a focal point of my graduate studies and my four decades of university teaching. Using race, gender, and sexuality as analytical tools, my research enriched traditional approaches to political economy.

Mary's book list on capitalism’s iniquities

Mary E. Hawkesworth Why Mary loves this book

As economic inequality has grown exponentially over the past five decades, some of the dispossessed have rebelled. 

Focusing on mobilizations in Brazil, Mexico, and Salvador, Gledhill demonstrates how struggles for social justice are transformed into “threats” to national security, which require “securitization” measures. Through intricate ethnographies, the book documents the deployment of the police, military, and paramilitary to quell domestic disputes.

Protests by students, laborers, migrants, Indigenous, the poor, environmentalists, and human rights activists are subjected to police “pacification” involving state violence, criminalization, incarceration, and sometimes death.

Situating securitization in the context of transnational and global relations generated by capitalist uneven development, Gledhill argues that the logic of capitalist accumulation in the current era is inseparable from repressive violence against “inconvenient” populations.

By John Gledhill ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The New War on the Poor as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

When viewed from the perspective of those who suffer the consequences of repressive approaches to public security, it is often difficult to distinguish state agents from criminals. The mistreatment by police and soldiers examined in this book reflects a new kind of stigmatization. The New War on the Poor links the experiences of labour migrants crossing Latin America's international borders, indigenous Mexicans defending their territories against capitalist mega-projects, drug wars and paramilitary violence, Afro-Brazilians living on the urban periphery of Salvador, and farmers and business people tired of paying protection to criminal mafias. John Gledhill looks at how and why…


Book cover of Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865-1905

Malcolm Rutherford Author Of The Institutionalist Movement in American Economics, 1918-1947: Science and Social Control

From my list on the economic mind in America from 1880 to 1960.

Why am I passionate about this?

When I was contemplating a topic for my PhD thesis, it struck me powerfully that American economics was severely under-studied, and that this applied even more so to those associated with “American institutional economics.” My research soon indicated to me that the literature that did exist was lacking in coverage and badly misleading. During my research in archives, I uncovered some real gems—just one example was the archives of the Robert Bookings Graduate School, an institution largely forgotten, but famous at the time. This was exciting and inspired me to continue on to provide a major re-evaluation of American economics in the interwar period.    

Malcolm's book list on the economic mind in America from 1880 to 1960

Malcolm Rutherford Why Malcolm loves this book

American economics in the Progressive Era (usually dated from the later 1800s to World War I) is quite fascinating.

Mary Furner’s book is an excellent discussion of the developing American social sciences in this period.

American universities developed rapidly along with the professionalization of the social sciences. At the same time, rapid US industrialization created a raft of new economic and social problems that demanded a response.

This created a tension between the desire for professional “scientific” standing and the demand to respond to obvious social problems by advocating for particular policy responses.

Furner pays particular attention to the work and career of economist H. C. Adams, who was a teacher to a number of the later institutionalist group. In the institutionalist literature, this tension is expressed in the conjoined goals of “science and social control.” 

For institutionalists, the solution to this problem was found in the pragmatic and instrumental…

By Mary O. Furner ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Advocacy and Objectivity as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This award-winning book of the Frederick Jackson Turner Studies describes the early development of social science professions in the United States. Furner traces the academic process in economics, sociology, and political science. She devotes considerable attention to economics in the 1880s, when first-generation professionals wrestled with the enormously difficult social questions associated with industrialization. Controversies among economists reflected an endemic tension in social science between the necessity of being recognized as objective scientists and an intense desire to advocate reforms.

Molded by internal conflicts and external pressures, social science gradually changed. In the 1890s economics was defined more narrowly around…


If you love The Coming First World Debt Crisis...

Book cover of Crossing: A Chinese Family Railroad Novel

Crossing by Lisa Redfern,

Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad. 

Book cover of The Economy: Economics for a Changing World

Ana Espinola-Arredondo Author Of Intermediate Microeconomic Theory: Tools and Step-by-Step Examples

From my list on getting into microeconomics.

Why am I passionate about this?

When understanding the interactions in our economy, it is critical to recognize all participants in this complex system. I’m passionate about microeconomics because it provides me with a different perspective to examine the world around me. I use my microeconomic glasses and I enjoy rationalizing the daily interactions and predicting the potential outcomes.

Ana's book list on getting into microeconomics

Ana Espinola-Arredondo Why Ana loves this book

This eBook, developed by faculty members from top institutions, is available for free from the developers’ website, offers several online resources, it's frequently updated, translated to several languages, and has been widely adopted in several countries.

The book includes both the usual topics for courses on introduction to microeconomics and introduction to macroeconomics, using a similar writing style as other introductory textbooks (assumes no mathematical background), thus being accessible to a wide range of students.

Unlike similar books, however, it structures topics differently: instead of presenting chapters according to the main tool or concept being introduced, chapters are presented according to real-world problems.

While this can help motivate each chapter, it may require some adapting from the instructor’s teaching style.

By The CORE Team ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Economy as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The only introductory economics text to equip students to address today's pressing problems by mastering the conceptual and quantitative tools of contemporary economics.

OUP has partnered with the international collaborative project of CORE researchers and teachers to bring students a book and learning system that complements and enhances CORE's open-access online e-book.

The Economy:
- is a new approach that integrates recent developments in economics including contract theory, strategic interaction, behavioural economics and financial instability
- Engages with issues students of economics care about, exploring inequality, climate change, economic instability, wealth creation and innovation, among other issues.
- provides a…


Book cover of A History of Japan: From Stone Age to Superpower

Chiara Terzuolo Author Of Hidden Japan: A guidebook to Tokyo & beyond

From my list on books before visiting Japan.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have been studying Japanese since 2008, studied in the country twice, and then finally made my home here in 2011. Over the years, I have been to 43 of Japan’s 47 prefectures, writing articles about my experiences and constantly searching for new, hidden places where I could still find a touch of the Japan of yore. With so many people visiting the country, I want to do my part to give folks options that are off the beaten path and away from the crowds. 

Chiara's book list on books before visiting Japan

Chiara Terzuolo Why Chiara loves this book

I have a hard time keeping track of all the main events of Japanese history, and among the many (MANY) tomes I have read, this one gets the balance just right without being overwhelming.

It gave me a good general overview that now allows me to explain the most important points of the country’s history to others and wasn’t boring or overly academic. 

By K. Henshall ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A History of Japan as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In a rare combination of comprehensive coverage and sustained critical focus, this book examines Japan's progress through its entire history to its current status as an economic, technological, and cultural superpower. A key factor is a pragmatic determination to succeed. Little-known facts are also brought to light, and the latest findings used.


Book cover of A Theory of Justice

Paul Guyer Author Of Virtues of Freedom

From my list on freedom in theory and practice.

Why am I passionate about this?

I discovered philosophy while still in high school and was lucky to study with some of the most exciting philosophers of the twentieth century in college and graduate school. I then taught philosophy in several of America’s great universities for fifty years myself. I have been fascinated by the philosophy of Kant since my first year of college and I gradually came to see Kant’s theory of the value of freedom as the core of his philosophy and a reason to devote a lifetime to studying it. I hope you will find these books as illuminating and rewarding as I have.

Paul's book list on freedom in theory and practice

Paul Guyer Why Paul loves this book

This is the greatest work of modern political philosophy. Building on Kant and Mill, Rawls argues that we best express our nature as free and equal beings in a society that maximizes personal and political rights and equal access to public offices and opportunities more generally.

Although liberalism is now under pressure in many places, I believe that Rawls’s defense of its core principles remains as powerful as ever.

By John Rawls ,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked A Theory of Justice as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book.

Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal…


If you love Ann Pettifor...

Book cover of Child of Vanris

Child of Vanris by Nikki McCormack,

At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…

Book cover of Aristotle's Politics

Rebecca Kingston Author Of Plutarch's Prism: Classical Reception and Public Humanism in France and England, 1500-1800

From my list on why politics matter.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have been a student of the history of ideas, with a particular interest in political thought, for over forty years. I have read countless books, both ancient and modern, and in several languages, that explore themes related to public life. I am a dedicated citizen of a contemporary liberal democracy, but today, I live in fear of a growing backlash against liberal democracy. The risk of democratic backsliding in the contemporary US is real as citizens become more disillusioned with politics. In other liberal democracies, some party leaders are adopting populist rhetoric to enhance their electoral appeal, but in doing so, they are undermining some of the established norms of public life. 

Rebecca's book list on why politics matter

Rebecca Kingston Why Rebecca loves this book

Aristotle offers a classic statement and argument for politics as an extension of ethics. For people to live well and strive for good things, they need to live in a political community. How politics is done has a direct impact on the quality of people’s lives.

I am always inspired by Aristotle’s recognition of how peaceful discussions over the nature of justice constitute the central feature of political life and how good politics necessarily implies reciprocity and efforts to advance the well-being of all citizens.

By Aristotle , Carnes Lord (translator) ,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Aristotle's Politics as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

One of the fundamental works of Western political thought, Aristotle's masterwork is the first systematic treatise on the science of politics. For almost three decades, Carnes Lord's justly acclaimed translation has served as the standard English edition. Widely regarded as the most faithful to both the original Greek and Aristotle's distinctive style, it is also written in clear, contemporary English. This new edition of the Politics retains and adds to Lord's already extensive notes, clarifying the flow of Aristotle's argument and identifying literary and historical references. A glossary defines key terms in Aristotle's philosophical-political vocabulary. Lord has made revisions to…


Book cover of The Grapes of Wrath
Book cover of Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
Book cover of No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs

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